I would have imagined that the remaining few pieces would have been carried down to the camp by now, rest assured if they haven’t yet they will shortly. They will certainly not be left for long as every last component of the raft had an intended secondary purpose, which will be at least the second time each item has been reused. I personally think that is quite ‘environmentally friendly’ Brad, even if ‘housekeeping’ may have slipped slightly.

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The raft will be recycled again and used for construction work onsite as well as water storage etc.
The reason it is in pieces is because it had to be dismantled to get it back.
Would you rather it had been abandoned at the riverside where children might have decided to try and sail downstream on it??
It is not possible to get all the pieces from the gate to the site in one go and all the protestors have been working really hard – on this and site-based projects but are taking pieces to where they are needed as and when they can.
It is not causing any harm to the environment. There are planks of wood and plastic barrels which, as stated above used to contain fruit juice. (It does say that on them if you’d like to check)

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I’m sure the people of Telford and Wrekin will love to hear that tunnel extraction teams are going to cost thousands of pounds of tax payers money.

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In response to ‘Aitch’s comment, as one of those actively involved in the river run, I catagorically state that NOT ONE of the rafters owns a car, let alone can afford to go on a plane anywhere on holiday…so your point quite frankly had no point at all.

To Ian’s comment about the barrels. The barrels were reclaimed from landfill and have been recycled not once, but twice as part of this project. The barrel’s were previously used to store fruit juice. The wood for the raft was wood from sustainable sources and again, will be reused after the raft was dismantled. There was nothing polluting, or unsustainable about the project. That was the WHOLE point.

In addition, we are not advocating the use of plastics such as the plastic used to make the barrels but its better to reuse them than contribute to landfill.

As for burning landowners trees. I presume this is a reference to the campfires on the protest site? The trees were felled by UK Coal, NOT the protesters. UK Coal specifically agreed to not fell mature trees, defined as trees over 50 years old. They have, they felled lots of them. So the branches we burn for heat, hot water, food, and cleaning purposes are from trees that UK Coal should never have felled in the first place. We are making the best of a bad situation, using resources made available to us because of someone else’s mistakes. I consider that resourceful, if nothing else.

As one of the protesters on the raft, the point was to raise awareness, to get the message out there to people, which we clearly did by the amount of leaflets that were given away, and to do it in a way that meant the resources used to make the raft could be reused for other projects on the site. Again, we were successful. We recieved NOTHING but messages of support and cheers the whole way down the river. We made our point. If you don’t like it that’s your problem…but I am proud of our achievements on the raft, the publicity we recieved and the support people gave us. We had a great day and it served its purpose. You may not care what the mine will mean for us and future genenrations in Telford, and what a huge negative impact it will have in so many ways…but I sure as hell do.

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